Snowboards are a recently developed alternative to skis for winter recreation. Envisioned as something of a hybrid of a skateboard, a surfboard, and a water ski, a snowboard allows a rider to traverse downhill snow-covered slopes or to perform freestyle stunts on the snowboard.
A snowboard rider negotiating a downhill slope or freestyle exhibition moves his body and shifts his weight to direct the snowboard as desired. Since all efforts to control and direct the snowboard are accomplished through the legs and feet, riders desire as much direct contact with the snowboard as possible, thereby ensuring that they can feel how the snowboard reacts to their movements.
At the same time, it is also desirable for the rider's feet to be secured firmly to the snowboard to ensure that his or her body movements are translated accurately into directed snowboard motion. In most snowboard bindings known to the art, a base plate is attached directly to the snowboard itself and forms an intermediate layer between the snowboard and the rider's boot.
However, at least three drawbacks hamper existing bindings which incorporate base plates between the boot and the snowboard. Base plates increase snowboard rigidity, diminish the rider's ability to feel and quickly respond to the snowboard's motion, and raise binding cost and complexity. When a snowboard is too rigid, it cannot bend in response to contours in the snow, thereby diminishing its responsiveness and generally making the snowboard more difficult to control. Increased response times can put the rider into potentially dangerous situations, where split-second response times are even more important.
In the few prior art snowboard bindings that do not require an underfoot base plate, the bindings have been rigidly mounted in place, and, therefore, will not securely accommodate the rider's boots in a variety of positions at his or her preference.
When riding a snowboard, the rider's feet are generally positioned across the long axis of the snowboard in much the same way that one would ride a skateboard. Among riders, however, there are various preferences over the preferred position of the feet. While some riders point their feet toward opposite ends of the board, others prefer a toe-in stance. Still others prefer to orient the feet in parallel across the board's length or at another angle.
What is desired therefore, is a snowboard binding that allows a rider to feel the board beneath the feet, and that gives a rider more choice than is presently available with respect to the position and angle at which the bindings are mounted.